Archive for January, 2009

When it refers about cultural change, Kevin Kelly is your man. He was born in Pennsylvania in the year 1952 and has worked as a writer, photographer and conservationist. Nowadays, he lives in California, has married and has three children. Despite only going one year to university and then gave it up, his articles have appeared in such important newspapers as the New york times, Esquire, The Economist..

Kevin Kelly in his house of San Francisco.

Kevin Kelly has done lots of things during his life: founded Walking Journal, director of the Point foundation, editor of Whole Earth Review…However, in my opinion, the striking anecdote is that his book(Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World)was read before the start of filming The Matrix by the principal actors of the film.

But why am I talking about Kevin Kelly apart from being an excellent expert in digital culture?. The reason is that he has done a speech predicting the following 5,000 days of the Internet, and describes very well what is going to happen. Mainly, he explains that all the electronical devises will change into one machine. Not only does he explain that but also that there will be an increasingly contribution of users and that it will appear the semantic web. Finally, he says that the web will be better and it will be a renewed one.

Kevin Kelly during his speech predicting the next 5,000 days of the Internet.

A markup language is an artificial language that uses a set of annotations to text that give information about the structure of the text or how it must be displayed. There are more than one markup language but, probably, the most popular ones are the HTML and the XML because of their massive use in the World Wide Web. Both of them have its origin in the SGML but after analysing them we can find some differences:

The XML (eXtensive Markup Language), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), it is a language conceived to ‘describe’ information. The main aim of XML is to help us organizing contents, what makes it also recommendable and portable to other types of applications. By contrast, the HTML (HyperText Markup Language), developed by Berners-Lee in 1991, was conceived to ‘show’ information. Its main function is to help us giving contents a format and present them through a navigator.

Another special characteristic of the XML is that it is an open language. When we are working with the XML markup language we are allowed to create and determine our own tags and document structures. By contrast, with the HTML all tags have been predefined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

In the XML markup language each one of the tags always executes the same function so it is important to respect them. Besides, XML tags are considered ‘case sensitive’, what means, for instance, that it is not the same to write <B> or <b>. For all these reasons, the XML markup language is helping us to be more organized because due to the great tolerance of navigators, markup languages were gradually becoming a bit chaotic.

Nowadays, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is working on the XTHML (eXtensive HyperText Markup Language) to integrate in one system the benefits of the XML and HTML at the same time.

Orality is a verbal expression used when writing and printing were unknown at all. Studies of oral tradition and orality are pretty much connected. However, orality also touches some other aspects such as political and economial. According to Walter J. Ong, there are two types of orality:

Primary orality: This refers to those cultures that didn’t have any knowledge of writing.

Secondary orality: It refers to a much more advanced culture, which used to have kowledge of writing. Moreover, it became the medium of memory.

We might find interesting the researches made by Walter J. Ong. Gathered at W. J. Ong [1982] Orality and literacy: Technologizing of the word as well as some words at E. A. Havelock [1986] The muse learns to write.

About writing we can say that it is the representation of a language through some different signs drawn on something, normally engraved. The first writing evidences go back to 4000 b.c but it has been in a non stop developing through the years. Nowadays, it is known that it has been in two different ways along:

expressed by ideas.

represented by sounds.

In spite of that, nowadays hypermedias, which is a more extended word for hypertext, are becoming more common. It consist of adding videos, graphics, audio… for what we used to write, so that they give the chance of interancting with users.

This way, hypermedia enable us, for instance, to build multisensory texts; words can now be explained by hyperlinked videos in what we could consider an example of secondary orality. Besides, new phenomena like electronic literature, written literary texts thought to be read on the screen, have recently appeared, widening the possibilities of human information transmission. And this is just the beginning.

Kevin Kelly, author that we have been studying in class and editor ofWiredmagazine, has recently talked about the first five thousand days of the Web in an informal meeting at the EG 2007 Conference, where he, also, shared with all of us through a revealing video his main thoughts about how he thinks the future of the Web will be. Summing up, we could say that Kelly announces three main changes in the evolution of the Web:

An increasing contribution of users

The ‘semantic’ Web

The AI of the Machine

Let’s analyze these improvements carefully. In first place, according to Kelly, users are going to make the Web more capable somehow. We will be able to provide the Web up-to-date information, data, photos…We will take a more active part in ‘building’ the Web. The Wikipedia, weblogs, or wikis, for instance, are good examples of this movement. We are gradually widenning the senses and abilities of the Machine.

In second place, Kevin Kelly talks about what he calls the ‘semantic’ Web. In his opinion, we are going to stop linking pages and we are going to begin linking ideas and concepts. These hyperlinked ideas and the optimization of search engines that Web 2.0 bring us will be extremelly beneficial, allowing us to surf a network of connected thoughts.

In third place, Kelly reflects on the AI of the Machine and its possibilities. He believes that in the future the Web will be smarter, more intelligent…, that the Web will offer a wider range of services, that the Web will know us, and, consequently, that it will be much more personalized.

Kevin Kelly, digital culture expert, reaches to the conclusion that the next five thousand days of the Web are not going to be just a better Web, but a whole renewed, reinvented and different Web.

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